Sense of Place

May 5–August 1, 2009
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Curated by James Patten
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Presented in conjunction with the Windsor Printmaker’s Forum
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University of Toronto Art Centre

Sense of Place is a cross-border juried print exhibition organized and circulated by the Windsor Printmaker’s Forum and juried by Iain Baxter&, Nancy Sojka and James Patten. The show brings together works by 30 artists from Canada and Michigan exploring the theme of place through printmaking.

Ranging across traditional print techniques on traditional surfaces (such as monotypes, etchings, woodcuts, lithographs, and silkscreens) to digital prints and found objects, the show maps out the broad field of contemporary printmaking practice. The works’ approach to the theme is largely conceptual. While there is some landscape imagery in the show, the works selected focus more on the how our sense of place is linked to our sense of self. As cultural geographers explain, place is a way of describing meaningful space; one of the ways of converting space into place is developing a sense of belonging or connection.

For some, a sense of place is inevitably connected to home, for others, who start from a fundamental sense of displacement; it entails movement and the search for a fit. This disjunction in the experience of place is foregrounded by the works’ engagement with printmaking. By drawing on printmaking’s capacities for reproducibility and circulation through the production of images by impression or transfer, the works in the show move from an engagement with rootedness and the anchoring of belonging to an evocation of loss, distance and longing. The use of reproduction to create a singular image or the creation of multiple and circulating images of an intense and personal engagement with the specific opens up the experience of place as an ongoing process rather than a fixed and natural given.

Our Supporters

We gratefully acknowledge the Lead Support of Peter A. Allen with additional project support from the Ontario Arts Council and Manulife Financial.
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Title Image: Installation view of Sense of Place, 2009. Image credit: Toni Hafkenscheid.